Rock Band's Alex Rigopulos:
The OXM Interview

OXM: So what should be expected in years to come? You’ve got the middle of the strata, the bands that you have now and the ones that you’re getting, and then there’s the upper level ones like Led Zeppelin and The Beatles that you may never get, and then there’s the garage band, the guy down the street who doesn’t have enough to make it worthwhile. So how deep down do you think you guys are you going to go, and how high up?

AR: Well, with respect to your first question I don’t really think any artist is off the table. We’ve made huge strides just in the last year in getting certain artists that were previously inaccessible in video games, like Metallica. And I think that’s just the beginning. A lot of these artists, particularly the older huge artists, didn’t grow up with video games. They view it as this side thing, they don’t take it seriously — it’s sort of a weird ancillary opportunity. It’s not an artistic medium for them and they just sort of see it as this side thing that they don’t really get. But given what’s happened in the last couple of years and given where Rock Band is headed, now we’ve seen a lot of major artists — particularly more classic artists who were writing off video games as something that they wouldn’t want to participate in — all of a sudden they see Rock Band as a legitimate artistic medium to which their fans can connect with their music on a deeper level. And that changes their perspective. Already we’ve seen major artists who have said no to us for years and years all of a sudden have finally said yes. And I would say that looking ahead in the next couple of years, really, everybody is on the table.

Now, to answer your second question about smaller artists, this is a major priority for us, particularly when you move into downloadable content. That’s an area where you can do two things. First of all, you can pick particular artists, major artists like Metallica or our recent announcement of The Grateful Dead as a couple examples where you can go incredibly deep. You can pretty much offer an entire catalog by a major artist. Another thing you can do is go incredibly diverse. You can go after niche artists that have an intensely passionate niche audience that aren’t big enough artists to justify a presence on a retail disc soundtrack but there’s definitely a passionate audience for and the economics work out that you can support those artists on the downloadable content medium. So one thing we can do is go varied and diverse on that downloadable content. Another thing we can do is use the platform to promote up and coming artists that people have never heard of. In the same way that MTV has promoted artists through the video medium on their channels, we actually see Rock Band as a way to break and promote new artists to the audience of people that are playing the game. So that’s definitely something that’s part of our plans.

OXM: Sounds incredibly ambitious as far as the manpower involved.

AR: Yep!

OXM: How many thousands of people are we talking about? It’s very ambitious — that’s a lot of people right?

AR: Well, you’ve heard Will Wright talk about this. I think that one direction that the video game industry is headed in general is actually putting the power into the hands of the masses and letting the audience author the music. One possibility that we’re actually considering is releasing our own authoring tools out freely into the world, such that if you’re a band and you and your three friends are in your bedroom or garage making music, and no major label will even give you the time of day but you believe in your music, you can actually produce a game level yourself and send it to us for publishing on the game servers or distributing to your friends. So that’s a possibility, user generated game content, this could explode the productive capacity of content for the platform.

OXM: Wow, it’s insane to think of the possibilities.

AR: Yeah, we’re going to be busy for the next few years!

OXM: Where does the game’s website fit into your plans?

AR: With rockband.com, we’re really planning to do some things that just have not been done in the world of video games before. Particularly, we’re trying to bridge the gap between the insular world of console game servers and the PC based world outside that. What we’re intending to do is essentially have a huge community site as part of rockband.com that’s directly linked into what’s going on with the game servers.

So if you create characters in a band in the Rock Band universe, you can actually create a band page in the PC-based universe of rockband.com that tracks all of your progress, your world tour and your game achievements. So for example, the game has a really deep sophisticated character creation system for your Rock Band avatars. You can really go crazy with hair-dos and outfits and also we have this 2D tattoo editing system, a paint system that you can use not just for tattoos but for clothing patches and things like that. You can really paint anything and turn it into a tattoo or patches on clothing — it’s a really fun system, and I think people are going to like it a lot. There’s also a band logo creator, so when you name your band, you can create your band logo and edit the graphical style. So all of that stuff, we’re going to be able to export to your web pages, and from there you’ll be able to take your band avatars, pose them, create album covers with your band logo and different scenes with your avatars. And then you’ll be able to turn that into real world stuff. For example, figurines based upon your Rock Band avatars, t-shirts with your fake band’s album art and your tour dates on the back from your accomplishments within the game, bumper stickers, old records, things like that. Really cool real-world merchandise based on this fictitious band that you’ve created in the game. And of course, all the normal community stuff like rankings, Achievements, and whatnot. But we really want to move on with expanding the fiction of these fake bands that people create out into the universe. I think there’s a lot of fun that people are going to have with that.

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